Witty Fay Gives Us Her New Poem. "Eudaemonia"

Witty Fay

Eudaimonia

This is a gracious lessonOn how to love me less,For in soothing you,My heart shall no longerCrave the beat of the day.First, bury my faceUnder piles of other stories,Eye-catching and promising.Fade my eyes into oblivion,Breaking the sockets open,And wasting their glow.Sprinkle salt on allMy nakedness,So that the taste of meShall no longer numb your days.Shape me into A cunning, all-too-lovingCreature of the flesh and silver.As for the heart -mine or yours-Smoke it into cinders,And wither the flame Into clouds of fire flies.Yes, pick a summer night,For the morning shall cladMe into a burst of glee,And your freed spiritShall be my reward.

Two Short Poems From Two VerseWrights Poets

John Alwyine-Mosely

The Circle Turns~ by John Alwyine-MoselyI'm from a village built on blood and sweat so the old ones say where mother and father played at weekend love and kids sniffed out the lonely to hold with terrier teeth.

Friends were made by page and word to talk away the bruise and make shouts a war cry in distant lands.

Today, that past is embers ready to burn bright a page or word so the old ones say.

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Natalie Keller

A Wrong Interpretation ~ by Natalie Keller

The kind of rain she stands inrequires no umbrella; her job,simply, to get soaked -mine, to write about it.The elements love her, love to knowthat someone like her exists.My pen loves her,loves to know that a lovelike that is worth existing.The storm is her monologue;the world spends its time wronglyinterpreting it, but she forgives itenough to go on repeating.

jacob erin-cilberto Returns, With His Newest Poem...

we get hammered on rhymethen drop a dime in the slotto take the ridemugged by morose meaninghidden under a trench coatof tyrannical rants

i saw you get off, carrying your terse versebeneath spelunking semanticsknowing it wasn't the dangerous city of causeyou were scared of,

it was that the train might pauseat my station,and you were afraid you might aimyour love at me

and pull the trigger.

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E. Michael Desilets Captures One Moment in Dublin

E. Michael Desilets

Dream Girl

There were a few old copper coinson the cardboard, a flat piece of wastefrom The Dessert Place. The girl'sfeet were bare and grimy, her gritty eyesthe color of the river, the coins,the shawl draped forever over hergrandmother's head.

The crossing was deserted now,but the buses would be unloading soona block away, and the ensuing jingle-jangleof coin on the carton would take her mindaway from the cold. She stuck her thumbinto her bucktoothed face and triedto burrow into the old woman'sbony lap...........Today the river made no noise. Later, she thought, she would walk on the wateras far as the Ha'penny Bridge. It would be darkthen, the fog laced with ice, trash rattlingin the alleys, after her grandmother slidback from the bake shop muttering as alwaysabout magpies.

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From Kelli Russell Agodon's Waltz Series...

Kelli Russell Agodon

Slow Waltz on a Hike with Damp Butterflies

What you unwrap is boxof yellowjackets, stingingnettles, and jellyjarsbecoming broken glass.This is not for the cottonhearted.This is for the man who holds firebetween his fingers and calls it love.We are burnttoast and prism jam.We are rubbing ourselves with the undersideof a fern trying to make the stinging stop.There are remedies everywhere--from beekeeper’s honey to handmade soap—we are what we keep near our skin.We are the stainedtowels we carry and the saintedbohemian monarchs that can’t fly.Or don’t want to.I place the constellations in my hand, thencomplain about the burning. Life sparks,weighs me down when I am tired.Let’s not say we have rocksin our pockets. Though I pretend I amthe novelist and you are the river.

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Cathedrals: Two Poems From Katherine Gallagher

Katherine Gallagher

Chartres Cathedral

The spires leaninto the airtouch the blue insideof the skylightlya philosophya cathedralabout to lift the worldoff its knees

The Long Reach Out of War

They will keep restoring the glassin broken cathedralsto carry the eye and the coloursthat were shatteredThey will keep restoring the stonein bombed cathedralsto carry the face and the ideathat were crushedThey will keep carrying the burdenof destroyed cathedralseven as the ashes blow backHumanitykeeping faith with itselfeven as the ashes blow backRead the poetry of Katherine GallagherRead a profile of Katherine Gallagher

Between Two Worlds In Tim Buck's "dazzle"

dazzleA boy asleep and turned to dreamsin the backseat of a car on vacationin 1958 to Lake Greeson in Arkansas...and he wakes up to his father's, “There's the lake!”But he looked out and he sawfrom a height and through treesan unusual thing of a certain blue --not a color belonging to any water.That plasma hue was beyond Bermudaor the bright turquoise of South Sea atolls.What he saw was dreamstuff residualand blended into a moment of waking --a confusion of worlds, a mystic marriageof water that lay and layering of marvelous.It never happened again that two dimensions merged.The boy was caught forever between life and otherness.

From New England? A Poem from Michael Lee Johnson

Michael Lee Johnson

If You Find No Poem

If you findno poem onyour doorstepin the morning,no paper, no knock on your door,your life poorly editedbut no broken dashesor injured meteryou do not wear whitesatin dresses late in lifeembroidered with violetflowers on the collar;nor do you haveburials dailyacross main street,no one whispersin your ear, Emily Dickinson-you feel alone--but not reclusive--the sand childstill sleeping in your eyes-wiping your tears away--if you findno poem onyour doorstep-you knowyou are not from New England.

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VerseWrights Welcomes Poet Kristin Maffei

Kristin Maffei

Prehistory

Now, I can’t fathom a New York before roads.When I read the Wappinger tribes lived

east of the Hudson to the Taconic MountainsI see the highway, train tracks

the mall where I bought my first earrings.I see satellite rivers on computer maps.

Panting against the cold air,red-eared, I hiked those hills.

I saw a bear once, and a moose, countless turkeys, deer.

On a class trip, we wandered a longhouse in a museum.Inside a plaster Iroquois woman crouched bare-chested

beside imitation flame, imitation papoose hanging on the ....wall.I made a model out of spaghetti, coffee grinds, leather ....scraps.

So easy to cook the new world foods: corn, beans, ....squashbut not to imagine the river Mahicanituk

without nuclear power plant on its shores.Less easy to find arrowheads in your yard

but not impossible – who didn’t hang a dreamcatcherin their rearview, wear moccasin driving shoes?

Who wasn’t in some way touchedby a feathered headdress set in a gold class ring

or else the man in loincloth dropped from a helicopterhand to mouth running around the football field?